Twitter Marketing Video – Use Twitter Lists and Get Thousands of Followers!

October 16, 2009 by Chris Record
Filed under Recent Articles, Social Media Marketing

Today Twitter launched a new featured called “Twitter Lists. This is a great new tool to help you organize the people that you follow and even more importantly a way for you to organize a Twitter account that follows “thousands” of people! I can honestly tell you that I have been waiting months for this feature and it has finally arrived and has simplified my Twitter experience and taken it to a whole new level.

You see, there are generally 2 groups of people when it comes to Twitter. One group follows as many people as possible hoping that most will follow them back in return and this technique really does add Twitter followers in the masses. The other group only follows a small select group of friends so that they can actually follow what they all tweet and not miss anything, but have to work much harder to get people to follow them. Until now there hasn’t been much middle ground. All that changed today.

When Twitter came out with lists I was pumped up because I am part of that first group of Twitter users that follows well over 10,000 people. With this new feature I was able to create a “friends” list with only 50 people on it and now I can read every one of their tweets and not miss anything! How cool :) But it got much cooler when I realized that I could also create several friends lists to manage all of the “new” people that I follow from this point forward for marketing purposes.

For example, if I specifically target tweets that mention real estate investing and follow those people, I can add them all to a real estate investing friends list on Twitter. This has several benefits. First of all it allows me to frequent their tweets and reply back to them or retweet great things that they write. This improves our communication and let’s met market to them much more effectively. The second benefit is that it shows me results of who actually decided to follow me back when I followed them. Let me explain in more detail exactly what I mean.

One strategy to get massive Twitter followers is to follow like-minded people on Twitter with hopes that they will follow you back in return. Not all of them will, but if you do this correctly for every 1,000 that you follow somewhere between 200-400 will actually follow you back! This is a great way to get targeted followers, but I wish it were just that easy.

Twitter has a few rules in place to stop people from following too many people at a time. Basically you can’t follow much more than 1,000 people per day, and they also impose a 1.1 ratio once you get past 2,000 followers. What is the 1.1 ratio? It simply means that you can only follow 1.1x that amount of people that are following you. For example, if you have 4528 followers, you would only be able to follow 4980 people at that time. That is exactly 1.1 times 4528.

Of course there is a pretty simple way to get around this limit :) Every few days you can use an automated tool that will “unfollow” everyone that chose not to follow you back. The free tool that I use is called Huitter. They have a mutuality tool that does this automatically for you with the click of a mouse. Pretty cool. So I simply follow as many like minded Twitter users as I can, and then every few days I will unfollow everyone who didn’t reciprocate the favor. For every 1,000 follows I end up with around 200-400 followers in return. Therefore my follower base grows by a few hundred each day, and by thousands each month! Pretty awesome right?

Now with Twitter lists I can manage all of these groups much more effectively and I plan on using this tool in even more powerful ways as I have had time to play with it some more.

So here are 3 questions I would like for you to answer in the comments below:

Are Twitter Lists currently turned on for your Twitter account?
What creative ideas have you come up with to use Twitter Lists?
Have you had any success with any other tools to massively increase your Twitter followers?

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Thank you for taking the time to read my blog. Please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments below! You can register using Disqus, Facebook Connect, or Twitter! This helps to create a more personalized blog and will allow other readers to visit your social media profiles! Thank you once again!

denis22

huitter is a free tool to follow all of those who follow you, but to unfollow, unless you enter every name in manually, is a subscription.
was it completely free at some stage chris? have i missed the boat?

Craig Harriman

I'm just getting started with Twitter so I don't really have any answers to your questions, but I was very excited when I saw the lists feature on my Twitter site today. I'm learning!

shannymoreno

Hi Chris - Great info! Thank you. I have marked your site as one of my favorites.

Eric Bonnici

Excellent Post Chris.

I have Twitter Lists enabled on my account and have played around with it. Plan to do more soon. Right now I'm gathering my thoughts, using Twitter Lists, and researching the topic. It will be interesting to see how people will use this feature.

Personally, I'm interested in how marketers will use the feature. And those who ignore it will be left in the dust.

One thing I foresee is marketers developing strategies to get added to other's lists. Specifically lists related to their niche or industry. Those who are found on numerous lists will dominate Twitter, after all when someone adds you to their list its a vote of confidence and great for your credibility.

The thing is you can only add people to your lists. You can't add yourself to other's lists. And that's the catch (also a good way to prevent spam on Twitter's end).

I believe you'll see marketers creating targeted Twitter Lists. Finding others in that niche/industry who have related lists. Then adding them to their list with hopes of reciprocation. Similar to how some marketers currently follow others in hopes of getting followed back. And I can also see individuals forming alliances agreeing to add each other to lists. While the simplest way of getting added to a list may be simply to contact the list creator and ask. Of course I would make sure to give them a valid credible reason why you should be added. Otherwise you're wasting your time.
.
Of course savvy marketers will surely figure out ways to do this and much more with Twitter Lists. I have some ideas too but want to make sure I have all the facts straight about this interesting new feature on Twitter.

Looking forward to reading more of your posts.

Sincerely
Eric Bonnici

blainerobles

Thanks for posting the valuable info Chris!
Being new to twitter I am sure this will assist me a lot
Blaine

Chris Record

Blaine, thanks for stopping by! Twitter can be a powerful tool if you know how to use it right. Hopefully you take action on the steps outlined in this video :)

Del Wratten

Great blog and video Chris. Any idea when Twitter will roll this feature out to the rest of us? Sounds like something I could use - I hate that I have "lost" my friends' tweets in amongst the many, many updates of all my other tweeple.

Chris Record

Keep checking everyday. It is currently in Beta version and they are releasing it to groups of users at a time. I am sure that you will get access to it very soon!

BillCrosby

Nice job Chris. I can't wait to really dig into the new function and see how fast we can drive it!

Chris Record

Thanks Bill. Like Gabe Strom said, I really do believe that this is a game changer and is a huge step forward for guys like us that are following thousands of people and have lost a lot of the intended functionality with Twitter. Now that we have gained the ability to stay on top of tweets more often from like minded entrepreneurs I am going to start using Twitter more frequently as a form of consistent communication. I am still looking for solutions to manage spam, direct messages and garbage @replies. Let me know if you have anything solid for that :)

Britney Bennett

Those are great tools! I don't have too many Twitter followers yet, but I'm working on it. Those tools will probably help me get more. Thanks!

Chris Record

Thanks Britney. There are several automated tools that can do a lot of this for you, but many of them require some sort of monthly investment if they are any good. So it really comes down to time and if you want to leverage money for automation to save you time, or if you would rather spend time to save money and do it yourself. I currently do a little bit of both because I love trying out everything. If you ever have any Twitter marketing questions, feel free to ask me in the comments!

gabestrom

I was wondering when Twitter was going to make this change for us..... This is a game changer though.... Thanks for sharing the Tip Chris!

Chris Record

Gabe, thanks for stopping by the blog! Yes indeed this is a game changer and I appreciate you promoting this article on Twitter as well. I am glad that you enjoy my new blog because we are just getting started :) I look forward to collaborating with you in the near future for a brainstorming session on the future of social media marketing...